The Innocent's Story (review)

"Murdered. That's nice. I probably made the local paper," dryly says thirteen-year-old Cassina, blown up, along with her little sister, when a terrorist bomb explodes in an English railway station. Cassina is now a para-spirit, a collection of mist stuck floating around the world, catching rides in congenial human—or sometimes canine—bodies. Happenstance brings her into the body of Ahim, who initially seems to be merely a lost and victimized soul; soon, though, she realizes that Ahim is in fact the railway-station bomber, determined to be a religious martyr but instead doomed to be immortal. This is an ambitious and conceptually challenging novel, with obvious and discussable implications for real-world situations (though Ahim and his cohort are members of a fictional faith and country). Singer, author of the intriguing Feather Boy (BCCB 4/02), is particularly good at creating a history and emotional circumstances for Ahim that make both his violence and his protective impulses credible, and the para-spirit experience is creatively imagined. The fantasy and real elements of the novel sit uneasily together, however; the story becomes surprisingly static and talky for such a meaty plot, the fictionalization of the terrorists' origins is intrusively evasive, and the exploration is ultimately rather heavy handed and preachy. The originality of the notion is still impressive, though, and the book succeeds in an interesting fable-like trajectory that gives a pleasing aesthetic shape that keeps things from bogging down in message. Readers intrigued by the many recent explorations of the afterlife may therefore enjoy following the adventures of the late Cassina even as they consider the import of her experiences.